Okay. How does the fact that water boils at 100C help you when you cook? Let me state this another way. Imagine that the inventor of the Celsius scale arbitrarily decided that the boiling point of water would be 1000C. What would you do differently when cooking?

In case you're scratching your head trying to figure out my awesome brain-bender the answer is "nothing".

Okay. So? All arbitrary numbers. Like 32 and 212.

Great. How does the fact that water boils at 100C help you when you cook?

That's actually what it's like at "Mojave Spaceport". Hangers of small aviation practicioners and their junk. Gary Hudson, Burt Rutan, etc. Old aircraft and parts strewn about. Left-over facilities from Rotary Rocket used by flight schools. A medium-sized facility for Orbital. Some big facilities for BAE, etc. An aircraft graveyard next door.

SS2 has not completed testing and it is probable that there will be a need for redesign of one or more components. So, this is a really bad time to have the hand-off. Publicity isn't a good reason.

Sigh. Please read my post repeatedly until you get it. I never said that "0" and "100" celsius aren't "useful", just that it's entirely arbitrary. Also note that it won't work in "most places" - it only works at sea level at normal atmospheric pressure for pure water. Anything other than that is slightly off.

Which again supports my point. For real world use there's little difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit for people who use them. That celsius is based on properties of one chemical compound (out of millions of compounds) really doesn't make it more useful for anything. I mean, if you're at sea level with normal atmospheric pressure and you're boiling a pot of distilled water then you can safely say that it's 100 degrees Celsius. What, exactly, does that gain the normal person? Nothing more than saying it's 212F. Yes, 100 is a pretty and round number but in the real world it is, again, not relevant.

LOL. Let me help you:

1. the freezing point (arbitrary but easily observable state)
2. of pure water with no dissolved substances (arbitrary but common chemical compound)
3. at sea level (arbitrary but easily located place)
4. at normal atmospheric pressure
5. on earth (arbitrary but very convenient location)
6. is 0 degrees (arbitrary value which kind of makes sense until you realize that you can still get colder)
7. and the boiling point of water at sea level on earth at normal atmospheric pressure (previous comments still apply)
8. is 100 degrees (arbitrary number chosen for convenience of the units - "10" would be too course grained and "1000" would be too fine grained)

So, yes, the celsius scale is arbitrary, the Fahrenheit only slightly more so. At least the celsius scale can be kind of reproduced in a pinch if you're at sea level and normal pressure and you have water and the ability to freeze and heat it. But, then, if you have all that you can reproduce the Fahrenheit scale, too.

For an idea of a less arbitrary scale look at the Kelvin scale. On it, "0" is the absolute lowest temperature where matter has absolutely no heat content. Of course the scale is the same as celsius so it still ends up being arbitrary in scale, which *any* temperature scale will be. But "0" being "absolute 0" is what sets it apart.

"Boiling an egg" really means "heating it in hot water to cause the yolk and albumen to solidify". That can be done at a temperature far below the boiling point of water. This is good because in the summer local news stations can show how hot it is outside because you can "fry an egg on the sidewalk!" complete with a demonstration.

If I remember correctly 120F is the temperature needed. I used to make a custard ice cream which included a dozen uncooked egg yolks that couldn't be congealed. In order to accomplish this safely they had to be heated in a double boiler setup to around 105F and held there for 10 minutes which was supposed to be enough to kill the nasty bacteria that might be in there. It was a bit of a trick because if it got much hotter the yolks would congeal and become unusable.

This is exactly what I came here to say, too. It's easy for someone to sit in their office in DC or wherever and eavesdrop on the entire internet if traffic is unencrypted, so there's an incentive to simply be lazy and collect as much as possible. When they have to physically visit a person's home, office, whatever in order to eavesdrop - this is GOOD. Now there's an incentive to actually *think* and make sure you're doing the right thing before investing the resources needed to eavesdrop.

There is no reason that we have to pick one and abandon work on the others. I don't see that the same resources go into solving more than one, except that the meteor and volcano problem have one solution in common - be on another planet when it happens.

The clathrate problem and nuclear war have the potential to end the human race while it is still on one planet, so we need to solve both of them ASAP.

Sure, there are going to be mediating forces in the environment. Melting is an obvious one. The positive feedbacks have been getting the most attention because they are really scary. It appears that there are gas clathrates in the ground and under water that can come out at a certain temperature. The worst case is that we get an event similar to Lake Nyos, but with a somewhat different mechanism and potentially many more dead. The best case is a significant atmospheric input of CO2 and methane that we can't control.

I don't think I have to discount Trenberth. He's trying to correct his model, he isn't saying there is no warming.

That's part of the problem: "a story". I watched 4, 5, 6, and 1. 1 was bad enough that I haven't bothered to seek out 2 and 3.

I would note that in 4, 6, and 1 the entire plot was "attack the single point of failure on the enemy ship/base for the win".

Thanks.

McKitrick is an economist out of his field. Trenberth and Fasullo cite many of their other papers and the publications to which they were submitted, but it seems mostly not accepted. But their conclusion seems to be that there were other times in recent years that the rate of warming decreased for a time only for it to return to its previous rate. I only see the abstract for Kosaka and Xie, but they state "the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase."

No number is larger than any other number. Quantities are larger than other quantities. Numbers are symbolic entities that can represent a quantity, or not.

I imagine that the major financial companies make this part of their economic modeling. Most of them do publish weather-related and climate-related advisories regarding commodity and company price trends, etc. How detailed do they get? The wouldn't tell and I am the wrong kind of scientist to ask. Can we make a government or public one? Yes, the level of detail is the big question.

Oh, do I have to qualify that for you, like the hottest outside of a period of Milankovitch Forcing? Gee, maybe the Earth's orbit changed, like back then, and we just didn't notice.

Let's take a look at one of the references you cited:

A section of a draft IPCC report, looking at short-term trends, says temperatures are likely to be 0.4 to 1.0 degree Celsius (0.7-1.8F) warmer from 2016-35 than in the two decades to 2005. Rain and snow may increase in areas that already have high precipitation and decline in areas with scarcity, it says.

It sounds like we have reason to be alarmed.